Exhibitor and Vendor Registration for the 2026 MLA Annual Conference

Please join us as an exhibitor at our annual conference,
May 18-19, 2026 at Thomas College in Waterville, Maine!

Our exhibitor setup at Thomas College is in the middle of the action, Spann Student Commons, the area outside of the dining hall and a large meeting room. It’s also where the registration table will be located. Conference attendees will be passing through this space throughout the day and there are at least two designated exhibitor times each day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon where coffee and snacks will be served. 

Monday 5/18:

Tuesday 5/19

All exhibitor tables are 6ft tables with a black tablecloth. Extra tables will not be available for purchase this year with your registration. If there are unfilled tables on April 20th, I will offer them to interested parties and invoice you directly.

Monday Keynote Speaker:  Phuc Tran

PHUC TRAN—writer, tattooer, and classicist— has a train wreck résumé. His memoir SIGH, GONE won the 2020 New England Book Award and the 2021 Maine Literary Award. He has been a high school Latin teacher and tattooer for over twenty years, for which he has won no awards. Phuc’s 2012 TEDx talk was featured on NPR’s Ted Radio Hour, and he has been a Moth MainStage storyteller since 2023. Phuc has a children’s book series with bestselling illustrator Pete Oswald entitled CRANKY.

Tuesday Keynote Speaker: Tess Gerritsen

Internationally bestselling author Tess Gerritsen took an unusual route to a writing career. A graduate of Stanford University, Tess went on to medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, where she was awarded her M.D.

While on maternity leave from her work as a physician, she began to write fiction and in 1987, her first novel, Call After Midnight, was published. It was just the first of 31 suspense novels that she’s written over a 36-year writing career. She also wrote a screenplay, "Adrift," which aired as a 1993 CBS Movie of the Week starring Kate Jackson.

Tess's first medical thriller, Harvest, was released in hardcover in 1996, and it marked her debut on the New York Times bestseller list. Her novels have hit bestseller lists ever since. Among her titles are Gravity, The Surgeon, Vanish, The Bone Garden, and The Spy Coast. Her books have been translated into 40 languages, and more than 40 million copies have been sold around the world.

She has won both the Nero Wolfe Award (for Vanish) and the Rita Award (for The Surgeon). Critics around the world have praised her novels as “Pulse-pounding fun” (Philadelphia Inquirer), “Scary and brilliant” (Toronto Globe and Mail), and “Polished, riveting prose” (Chicago Tribune). Publishers Weekly has dubbed her the “medical suspense queen” and Time Magazine named her novel The Surgeon one of the best mystery/thriller novels ever written.

Her series of novels featuring homicide detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles inspired the hit TNT television series "Rizzoli & Isles," starring Angie Harmon and Sasha Alexander.

She is also a filmmaker. She and her son Josh produced a feature-length documentary, “Magnificent Beast,” about the ancient origins of the pig taboo. It aired on PBS channels around the country. Their previous film, “Island Zero”, was a feature-length horror movie that was released in 2018.

She lives in Maine.

Lodging

Registered vendors will receive a discount code to the Lockwood Hotel in downtown Waterville. There are a limited number of rooms and the discount expires on April 15, 2026. 

Thomas College is offering on-site lodging to participants and vendors. Please make arrangements with them directly by filling out their Guest Registration Form.

Please direct all questions by email to Meg Gray: atlarge2@mainelibraries.org.